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I want to make an animated gif for my avatar, but I can't find any program that would allow me to take a clip from my anime and turn it into a gif file. Does anyone have a suggested program and maybe provide a link to download it?

How can I, being the horrible lickspittle that I am, use VirtualDub to create .gif images that Unfreez will recognize for the sake of my animations?

Life indebted-ness is the reward for any help offered or leading to the capture of my goals....

You may need to use a program such as Irfanview to convert the extracted files from VirtualDub to the GIF compression image format. Or you can probably use PAINT to resave the image to GIF format. (File/Save As)

Sadly, I'm still getting .gif files upwards of 2megs +. Is there anyway to compress the animation without losing image quality or a large part of the animation. I've tried removing several frames and changing image size....

Update: down to around 215 k which is still a bit too big for avatar use....

Sadly, I'm still getting .gif files upwards of 2megs +. Is there anyway to compress the animation without losing image quality or a large part of the animation. I've tried removing several frames and changing image size....

Update: down to around 215 k which is still a bit too big for avatar use....

Thats very weird. I made a huge animated gif and it was about 700Kb max, 2Mb seems is too much! how many frames does your gif have? my animated gifs have 10 frames max, to keep up with the forum's rules. if you put around 30 frames with low quality you can also achieve the permitted size.

Sadly, I'm still getting .gif files upwards of 2megs +. Is there anyway to compress the animation without losing image quality or a large part of the animation. I've tried removing several frames and changing image size....

Update: down to around 215 k which is still a bit too big for avatar use....

A few things to note about this Unfreez program after trying it, it seems that it uses the frame replace method instead of the combine method. Thus one of the reasons for the larger file size. Frame replace is usually only needed when working with transparency animation.

Spoiler for GIMP extraction of Unfreez created GIF:

There also seems to no option to specify an individual frame delay, no layer reordering, and no idea on what Dithering mode that it is using. As Unfreez appears to only handle indexed GIF images, there would likely be even greater image quality loss due to even further compression for the animation.

I recommend using a more fully functional program if you want to get better results.

...using VirtualDub, how would one rip audio? I have an AMV here that is the only copy of a music selection that I know of and as the software is used to dub anime how would I undub it? Any help is appreciated mucho!

The first step is to save all of your desired image files into GIMP's XCF format, and to change the file name so that the files can be read by the GIMP Animation Package.

NEW

1) Copy all of your desired images to animate into a new folder.

2) Open what is to be your first frame into the GIMP.

3) Right-click on the image and then select Video/Frames Renumber..., then select OK on the Renumber Frames window.

4) Right-click on the image and then select Video/Frames Convert.... Then in the Convert Frames to other Formats window, change the Extension line to .xcf . Then remove the checkmark next to Flatten. Now select OK. A new image window should have now been created with the file format under the .xcf file extension. Also that should have been created are the .xcf files within the folder that contains the images that we started with in step two.

5) Move on to point 88 below. Finally you should be able to right-click on the opened .xcf image and then select Video/Frames to Image....

What these few steps can do is to save you the time in renaming and converting every image file manually.

OLD STEP
Open what is to be your first image/frame into the GIMP and then select: File/Save As... Then set under the Determine File Type menu, select: By Extension. Then label the file as film_000001.xcf . The numbers are important as they will indicate the place of order that the frames will be rendered.

Example: film_000003.xcf would be your third image, while film_000017.xcf would be your seventeenth image under your layer order.

Once completed with the renaming, be sure that all for your XCF images are located within the same folder directory. Now open film_000001.xcf into the GIMP.

88
Then right-click on the image and then select Video/Frames to Image.... In the Frames to Image window that had just appeared, you should see a input box labeled Layer Basename,.. should look something such as frame_[######] (41ms). The (41ms) that you see there will label every layer with a 41ms delay time. I recommend removing that millisecond delay setting as the master delay time can be configured later at the file save options. Example: frame_[######] (41ms) will become frame_[######]. Then select OK when done.

You should now see a new image window which should now contain multiple layers. You can now close out of the XCF image that we had first worked with, with changes unsaved. From here you can begin your editing such as filtering, cropping, and resizing. See guide in the following post: Cropping & Resizing under GIMP for Windows. By cropping and resizing the first layer (frame_000001), every following layer should then automatically reflect those changes.

Now set you individual frame delays: (Copy & pasted from the previous guide, with a few alterations.)

Setting Frame Delays

Within the Layers window, you should see something such as the following:

frame_000005
frame_000004
frame_000003
frame_000002
frame_000001

To indicate individual frame delays, specify each layer with a (###ms), where # equals an actual number.

This can be done by right-clicking on the layer name, and then selecting Edit Layer Attributes, which a window will appear to allow you to add the (###ms).
For layers seen above that do not specify a (###ms), they will be configured to the master frame delay found later at the end of this guide.

When finished editing, set the image mode to Indexed. (Right-click on image, Image/Mode/Indexed...). Select OK in the popup window. ***For improved image quality, select under Dithering Options: No color Dithering. In some cases, this will also help to reduce in overall file size over the normal Floyd-Steinberg color dithering.

***One additional step that could be done at this point is to right-click on the image and select: Filters/Animation/Optimize (for GIF). This will help to properly setup frame combine where available within your image layers. Note that this will also give you a new image window, which you will be working from as of now.

Now save the animation: (On image, right-click on it and then select File/Save As...). Then save under a different file name and under a GIF extension. Example: FinalAnimation.gif . Also be sure that Determine File Type is set to By Extension.

In the Export File window, select Save as Animation and then select Export. Within the next window, descriptions are as follow:

"Interlaced GIF
A feature of the GIF89a graphics standard, an interlaced GIF displays images in two passes of alternating lines instead of loading them one line at a time. Depending on which graphics viewer or Web browser is being used, interlaced GIFs may produce a "venetian blind" effect or simply a blurry or blocky image that gradually sharpens. Pages using interlaced GIFs let people see at least the outline of an image sooner; thus the pages often appear to load faster than those with noninterlaced graphics. If a browser doesn't support interlaced images, an image will simply appear as a normal (noninterlaced) GIF."

However, this can result in a larger file size.

GIF Comment - Say anything you want here.

Loop forever - When unchecked, this determines if you want the animation to play through only once.

Delay between Frames where Unspecified - The master delay time, or as I call it throughout this guide.

Frame Disposal where Unspecified:Combine - When playing, it combines the frame with the previous frame. Pixels that exactly match will be skipped in the rendering process and remain unchanged but still present. This usually results in a lower file size compared to the replace method.

Replace - When playing, every frame will overlap the previous frame completely. Used mostly for transparent GIF animation.

Continued from the GAP guide edition.
To crop and/or resize all frames automatically, under the Layers window, select layer frame_000001 (Or the lowest layer) by selecting it with a left-click of the mouse.

Cropping:

Select the Crop tool form the main GIMP window. Click on the image using your left-mouse button to bring up a Crop & Resize window. Within that Crop & Resize window, Origin X & Y will indicate the top left position of the crop plain. Height & Width will indicate the bottom right position of the crop plain. Select Crop when done to crop the image. Crop will also resize the canvas plain to the new crop points.

Resizing:

To resize the image, right-click on the image and then select (Image/Scale Image...). Within the Scale Image window, all that is needed here is to adjust the Pixel Dimensions. There you adjust the New Width and Height. Then select OK when done.